Measuring the True Potential of Lifestyle Brands in India: A Firm-Level Scale for Existing and Potential Investors - (FL-LBSi)

Abstract

It is evident that among more than 5000 Indian lifestyle brands, only a few brands are able to createtrue lifestyle brand image in their employees, investors, competitors, and consumer’s minds and thetrueness level of the majority of Indian lifestyle brands is still in question. The majority of developingand developed Indian lifestyle brands assume that the success of a lifestyle brand is measured basisthe revenue or profit they generate and are unaware of implicit long-term strategical benefits ofcreating a true lifestyle brand image in consumer’s minds. In India, the lifestyle category has alsobecome one of the most sought-after categories for many start-up entrepreneurs. Just because there isan evident gap for a certain lifestyle product category in the market and just attempting to fill such agap does not guarantee sustainable success. It is true that India is one of the countries with consumersbelonging to the widest range of Religions, Regions, Languages, Sub-Cultures and Economicbackgrounds which makes it very difficult for any lifestyle brand to own a true lifestyle brand imageat National level and makes it furthermore important for them to be more careful and efficient inensuring adaptation of right evaluation techniques and tools to regularly measure a brand’s the truepotential in attaining a sustainable profitable stage of its evolution. It is inevitable that both new andexisting lifestyle brands in India require investors to fund their journey of attaining the final stage ofevolution which is known as a sustainable profitable stage in addition to gaining true lifestyle brandimage among existing and potential employees, investors, competitors, and consumer’s minds.However, in the absence of any inputs driven measurement instruments, investors are in a quandaryto gauge, estimate and forecast the true potential of lifestyle brands in India before they make anyinvestment decisions and usually most of the investors follow traditional brand equity or valuationmethods which are mostly skewed toward output-driven measures. In this exhaustive empirical study,we have studied a few select lifestyle brands. investors and investments to identify 63 inputs basedsub-elements across 7 key elements and 3 dimensions to design a simple instrument named as FLLBSi, which would measure the true potential of a lifestyle brand in India irrespective of the brand’s current evolution stage/phase and age in the Indian retail market.